From being virtually ignored by theatres and playwrights, the issue of climate change now threatens to swamp the programmes of our flagship theatres. If this is a good thing, meaning that the heat has been turned up on the debate, can public interest be maintained at this rate? Is the topic at all sustainable? After Greenland opened at the National Theatre last week, now it’s the turn of Richard Bean’s new play, which had its premiere at the Royal Court last night, in a production starring the superb Juliet Stevenson. And if the National's contribution to the debate was a bit too cool, Bean's play is much hotter.

From being virtually ignored by theatres and playwrights, the issue of climate change now threatens to swamp the programmes of our flagship theatres. If this is a good thing, meaning that the heat has been turned up on the debate, can public interest be maintained at this rate? Is the topic at all sustainable? After Greenland opened at the National Theatre last week, now it’s the turn of Richard Bean’s new play, which had its premiere at the Royal Court last night, in a production starring the superb Juliet Stevenson. And if the National's contribution to the debate was a bit too cool, Bean's play is much hotter.

Who needs America for the American theatre? Barely six weeks into this year, and already we've had the bracing and bilious Becky Shaw, the West End transfer of Bruce Norris's perpetually award-scooping Clybourne Park and Woody Guthrie taking up residence at the Arts Theatre courtesy of Woody Sez. What's been lacking has been the sort of defining revival on the order of last season's All My Sons that shakes down an extant text, inducing in sometimes unruly West End audiences a wondrous hush.

A whiff of excrement hangs around DBC Pierre’s Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little. It’s a novel that likes to get right up into the crevices of society and then inhale deeply. Written in an anarchic, freewheeling American patois, it’s the inner voice of Vernon himself (and Pierre’s brutal way with a simile) that plays shock and awe with the reader, delighting many and appalling more. The loss of narrative voice would seem enough to deter any would-be theatrical adaptor, but in 2007 Tanya Ronder and the Young Vic took up the challenge. The result (newly revised) now makes a return – shotgun in one hand, the other down its trousers.

Theatre, particularly tragedy, can pack a terrific punch when things are kept simple – even if the themes evoked are enfolded in layer upon layer of complexity. Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, a play with three characters, each of whom takes to the stage alone, explores in a multifaceted way the life of an itinerant Irish healer who plies his trade along the backroads of the Celtic fringes of Britain.

Emlyn Williams may have been dubbed the “Welsh Noël Coward” and the action of his long-neglected Accolade may take place in a drawing room, but there’s little of the smiling social comedy to be found here. Trading sparkling cocktails and repartee for whisky and unpalatable truths, Williams’s play exposes the pinstriped hypocrisy of 1950s society – a society that will press its powdered cheek to all manner of sordidness in the name of Art, while recoiling from even a passing acquaintance with the workaday squalor of its members. Frank, and more than a little apt, the result is a stylish morality play that smuggles a progressive liberal agenda in under its cassock.

Back in the early 1960s, anyone with half a curious cultural brain in their heads would take themselves off to small fleapit cinemas like The Academy or the Classic in Oxford Street (now defunct). There you could catch the latest European art film. And at one of these I remember seeing Italian director Antonioni’s La Notte with Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. Such was its impact that neither I nor the flat mates I was with were able to utter a word until we reached home.

British theatre prides itself on being contemporary, up to date - in a word, hot. So it’s odd that, over the past decade, there have been so few plays about climate change. While everybody, and I mean everybody, has been talking about global warming, while climate-change deniers have been branded the new fascists, and while well-publicised protesters have tried to stop electricity stations from functioning, British playwrights have - with only a couple of exceptions - blithely ignored the subject.

Plays these days come not in single spies but in battalions of two, whether you're talking The Master Builder, King Lear or The Cherry Orchard, the last of which closes the visiting Sovremennik Russian theatre troupe's three-play season only to resurface at the National's Olivier in May, with Zoë Wanamaker

How inventive do you have to be to stage a great King Lear, to renew it? Those who've seen Michael Grandage's lean, frosty version might think the pristine lines drawn in the Donmar's sell-out production render this terrible and sometimes apparently baggy tragedy about as taut, lucid and modern as it can be. Yet there are problems there: yes, Derek Jacobi is mesmerising as the lead, not least of all because he's a miniaturist in gesture and inflection, and the Donmar's intimacy allows us to relish every grimace and tear.

How inventive do you have to be to stage a great King Lear, to renew it? Those who've seen Michael Grandage's lean, frosty version might think the pristine lines drawn in the Donmar's sell-out production render this terrible and sometimes apparently baggy tragedy about as taut, lucid and modern as it can be. Yet there are problems there: yes, Derek Jacobi is mesmerising as the lead, not least of all because he's a miniaturist in gesture and inflection, and the Donmar's intimacy allows us to relish every grimace and tear.